2. Lucy
LUCY
Milo hit the pavement mid-shriek, both fists full of crushed blueberry muffin, and Anjali had barely gotten, "Milo, sweetheart, we don't—" out of her mouth before Lucy was already down on the grass at his level.
"Hey. Hey, look at this." She held up a single blade of grass between two fingers, turning it like it was the single most interesting object in Bellwood Park. "You ever try to whistle with one of these? My brother taught me. Took me a whole summer."
Milo's scream hitched, curious despite himself, one eye cracking open to check whether this was a trick.
"Watch." Lucy pressed the grass between her thumbs and blew, and it shrieked out a thin, ugly, wonderful note that made a woman two benches over glance up sharply.
Milo's whole face changed. The crying didn't stop so much as get forgotten, the way a two-year-old's grief always did, total and then instantly obsolete.
"Again," he demanded, muffin still all over his hands, tears still wet on his cheeks, already reaching for the grass.
"Again," Lucy agreed, found him his own blade, and did not say a single word about the state of his hands, because the state of his hands was not the emergency. The emergency had been the muffin falling, and the muffin falling was already ancient history as far as Milo was concerned.
Anjali exhaled like she'd been holding her breath since spring. "I hate you. I hate you so much right now."
"You love me."
"I love you and I hate you. Both things.
" Anjali dropped back into her folding chair and grabbed her iced coffee, her shoulders coming down from around her ears all at once, the way they always did when a crisis ended before it really got started.
"How do you do that? I have tried the distraction thing.
I have tried it four times this week. It has never once worked for me. "
"You do it like you're trying to fix a problem. He can tell." Lucy settled back into her own chair, brushing grass off her knees, and reached over to steal one of Anjali's fries without asking. "You have to actually think it's interesting. Kids can smell performance from a hundred feet."
"I don't have time to actually think a blade of grass is interesting, Lucy, I have a spreadsheet due at four."
"That's the whole problem right there."
Around them, Bellwood Park moved as it always did on a warm weekday afternoon—joggers cutting the long loop past the fountain, a knot of teenagers arguing over a speaker that was too loud for the hour, a woman in scrubs eating lunch alone on a bench like it was the only ten minutes of quiet she'd get all shift.
Across the little wrought-iron table, Mira made a small, unimpressed noise into her wine and did not look up from her phone.
She'd come straight from the courthouse, still in her paralegal blazer with the top button undone in silent protest, sunglasses pushed up into hair she hadn't had time to redo since seven that morning.
"Some of us peaked at not having children, and we're thriving. "
"Some of us are also three glasses in at noon on a Tuesday," Anjali said.
"It's a half-day. I have rights." Mira set the phone face-down, finally, and looked at Lucy instead, the particular look she got when she'd decided the small talk portion of lunch was over. "Okay. Real talk. How's the job thing."
And there it was. Lucy had known it was coming—Mira always circled twice before she landed—but she felt the question anyway, the small flinch that she'd gotten good at not showing on her face.
"It's fine."
"That's not an answer, that's a deflection with a fine paint job."
"It's a work in progress." Lucy picked at the label on her water bottle, mostly to have somewhere to put her hands.
"I had two interviews last week. One family wanted someone forty hours a week for the price of twenty, and the mother kept saying 'like part of the family' in a way that made it very clear she meant unpaid overtime.
The other family was fine. The kids were lovely.
But the dad talked to me the entire hour like he was interviewing a vacuum cleaner, and I decided I'd rather stay unemployed a little longer than spend two years being talked over in my own kitchen. "
"You don't have a kitchen right now," Mira pointed out. "You have a hot plate and moral high ground."
"The moral high ground has excellent acoustics."
Anjali laughed, but it didn't quite cover the worry underneath it, and Lucy saw her glance, the kind of glance you gave a friend when you were doing math about her in your head. "How's the new room working out?”
"It's a room." Lucy shrugged, aiming for lighter than she felt.
"It's got a window. The landlady's very sweet and extremely nosy, which I've decided is a fair trade.
I'm not going to pretend it's the Marchetti house.
It's not four bedrooms and a garden and somebody else paying for the electric.
" She said it evenly, like a fact filed away rather than a wound reopened, and reached for another of Anjali's fries to give her hands something else to do besides betray her.
"Lucy." Mira's voice had gone quieter, careful in a way Mira almost never bothered to be. "I'm just going to say the thing. You could let one of us help. Just until you land somewhere. It's not charity, it's… I don't know, forward motion. You'd do it for either of us in about four seconds."
"I'm not borrowing money, Mira."
"I didn't say borrow, I said—"
"I'm not taking money." Lucy said it lightly enough, but there was a wall behind it that both women had learned, over years of friendship, not to push on more than once.
"I appreciate it. Genuinely. But I did the thing already where I let someone else hold the ground under my feet, and then they decided they wanted the ground back with no notice, and I am not doing that particular dance again.
Not even with people I love. Especially not with people I love. "
Nobody said Elena's name. Nobody had to.
It sat at the table anyway, the way it always did when the conversation drifted anywhere near money, or houses, or four years of somebody else's children calling her the wrong thing on accident—Mama, once, out of Josie, at a school assembly, in front of forty other parents, and Elena's face had done something complicated and pleased and terrified all at once.
And eleven months later, there had been a woman named Sara standing in the Marchettis' kitchen with a suitcase and a decade of unfinished marriage, and two weeks after that there had been a check on the counter and a very kind, very final conversation about transitions.
And Lucy had packed four years into six boxes and left without getting to say goodbye to Josie's spelling bee, which she had already promised to attend.
She still remembered the drive home that last day with the boxes rattling in the trunk every time she took a corner, remembered pulling over on the shoulder of the 9 because she couldn't see the lane markers through the windshield anymore, remembered thinking, absurdly, that she'd left her favorite mixing bowl in that kitchen and would never get it back and crying harder about the bowl than she'd let herself cry about anything else, because the bowl was a safe thing to grieve out loud.
She had told herself in the car that she would not do it again—pour herself, uncounted, into a family that could unmake her with a single conversation behind a closed door.
It was not a bitter thought. It was closer to arithmetic.
She loved children the way some people loved music, and she had learned the hard way that the adults around those children did not always love her back with the same lack of an exit strategy.
"Fair," Mira said finally, and let it go, which was its own small mercy.
"Fair," Anjali echoed, and reached over to squeeze Lucy's hand once, briefly, before letting her get back to stealing fries in peace.
They might have stayed there another hour, the three of them, if Lucy's phone hadn't buzzed against the iron tabletop with a number she didn't recognize, area code local, and something in her—some old, practical instinct built by eleven months of unemployment insurance and increasingly creative grocery budgeting—made her answer it instead of letting it ring through.
"This is Lucy Harper."
"Ms. Harper, hello, this is Patricia Voss, from Ashworth Placements.
You registered with us back in the spring?
" The voice was brisk, pleasant, unmistakably rehearsed, pleasantries trimmed down to their most efficient shape by however many hundreds of these calls had come before this one.
"I've got something I think you're going to want to hear, and I'd love five minutes if you have them. "
"I have five minutes." Lucy caught Anjali's eye across the table and mouthed agency, and Anjali sat up like a meerkat, instantly and unapologetically eavesdropping.
"Live-in position, full-time, immediate start.
One child, age seven. The family lost the mother—the child's mother—about six weeks ago, sudden illness, and the child is now in the legal guardianship of her aunt, who is looking to bring on a nanny as quickly as possible.
The aunt has the resources to make this extremely worth your while, Ms. Harper.
I mean extremely. We're talking a hundred and forty thousand, full benefits, private housing on the estate, and a signing bonus if you accept within the week. "
Lucy heard the number and felt approximately nothing, which surprised her a little, the way it always did when money that size got said out loud to her like it should mean more than it did.
What she felt instead was a small, quiet pull in her stomach at the child is now in the legal guardianship of her aunt—at lost the mother—at the picture that assembled itself instantly and without her permission, a seven-year-old somewhere in a house too big for her, learning the particular grammar of being motherless in real time.